The Rants & Rambles of A Grumpy Old Dude

Tag Archives: Mountie

The wife, daughter and I very much enjoyed the food and the treatment we got at the luncheon in my recent post, Sugar Beets Boredom. The presentation was to begin at 11:30 AM, with lunch at noon, and done by 1:00, but….the guests couldn’t all be wrangled into the dining room, the speeches ran long, there were more questions than anticipated.

Unfortunately, this was also the day I had to take my daughter an hour up the highway for medical treatment. We were to be there by 2:20 PM. Skipping a delicious dessert and coffee, we bailed at 1:15, dropped the wife at home on the way out of town, and headed for the highway. With a mile left to go, we were stopped at a crossroad by police.

Not only is the International Plowing Match being held right beside the interchange, but today’s the day the Prime Minister is visiting. We can’t get through! All we have to do is go a mile and a quarter in the wrong direction, drive up a county road and then back to the on-ramp from the other side. We made the hospital appointment, barely. In the city, or out in the country, you still can’t get there from here.

A plowing match! Yeehaw! How bucolic. In Southern Ontario, in late September, what could possibly go wrong??! Other than eight successive days of rain? Aside from our handsome Prime Minister, (Nope! I just couldn’t write that, and live with myself.) we had the Queen of the Furrow in a short little skirt and knee-length rubber boots because of mud up to your John Deere’s hubs. There was a pole climbing contest like a lumberjack meet. There were dancing tractors, like the Mounties on horseback, only in diesel. The soft glow on the horizon was from all the red necks.

A week later, the three of us went to the beautiful town of St. Marys, Ontario. I’m still old-school. I don’t shower much. I prefer a nice hot soaking bath. I’m a macho he-man kind of guy, so I don’t use bubble bath. I put in fragranced bath gel. There’s an important difference….to my ego!

We used to be able to buy it by the gallon from the distributor in Mississauga, when we went to the wife’s rheumatologist in Brampton, but they moved the warehouse to Barrie. There is a candle supply shop in St. Marys which carries the gel, and the wife and daughter wanted to stock up on wicks, tabs, holders and beeswax for candle-making, so off we went.

We drove out to Stratford, and turned left, and that was the first problem. Stratford is just on the edge of Mennonite country. Its streets aren’t quite as convoluted as K/W’s, but some still manage to run together at strange angles. Making left turns at two successive traffic lights just didn’t seem to make sense, so we enjoyed two and a half miles of pastoral scenery in the wrong direction, before I turned around.

We got to the store and home safely. When I checked Map Quest, for the distance from home to the store (it’s 63 Kilometers! If you don’t get lost. Thanks for asking.), it suggested a totally different route which would eliminate driving through Stratford entirely.

Stratford is the hometown of Justin Bieber, and I apologise profusely. As I said, it’s the edge of the Mennonite Tract, and with the name of Bieber, he didn’t know he had German ancestry. He claims he has enough native Indian blood to get free gasoline. He must be huffing it, because even full-blood Indians don’t get it free.

Instead of YouTube and Bieber, I offer you Canada’s first, and still best, Shakespearean Theater and Festival, and the handsome Canadian actor, Paul Gross. I attended Stratford’s Theater as a youngster in a school group. The main theater opened in 1953. I saw As You Like It, in the early summer of 1959. I’ve been to a few plays over the years. There are now four theaters. While they concentrate on Shakespeare, they also present plays by other playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw.

Paul Gross played a Dudley Do-Right type Mountie, bureaucratically stranded in Chicago, and assisting the Chicago police department, for three years, in the television series Due North. He was Canada’s highest-paid TV actor, making two million dollars a year.

After the program was cancelled, he went on to produce and star in a movie called Men With Brooms, about BrainRants’ favorite sport, curling. About ten years ago, just before my employer fell out from under me, I got a chance for the wife and me to see him on the Shakespeare stage as Hamlet. Unlike his previous light comedy, he rendered the brooding Dane quite well.

The next time we have to go to get candle supplies or bubble bath bath-gel, I think I’ll take the route Map Quest suggests. It will take us through the small town of Tavistock, well-known for the Tavistock Cheese makers. A half a mile above the highway is the tiny crossroads village of Sebastopol. I’d never heard of it, but apparently it has a huge, famous, Lutheran church. It’s just down the road from another Mennonite cross-road village called Punky-Doodles Corners, named by a drunken farmer newly arrived two hundred years ago, from Pennsylvania, trying and failing, to sing about Yankee Doodle.